on leaving singapore

As my departure for university nears I'm starting to get more apprehensive about it.

I think for slightly more than two years I've been buoyed along by this post-admissions-outcome glow. I was ridiculously happy - hey, who wouldn't be? - and somehow it's actually lasted this long. But now as I'm having to settle visa forms, flight and hotel bookings, and thinking about setting up a bank account... rooming with a total stranger probably from a culture quite dissimilar to mine... the laundry situation O.o... it's getting kinda daunting.

And let's not forget that my brains have rotted. I can understand about 30% of an average Chinese text. I've done nothing to my mind in NS except attempting to plough through Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and learning enough Cyrillic to read the labels of vodka bottles. I can barely remember all the math and economics that I did and that's going to be awfully important later on.

I'm flying out of Singapore on National Day. When I booked the flight I downplayed the obvious significance - after all it's just a date. But the significance looms ever larger and it seems a very decisive up-yours to Singapore, and although the whole notion of patriotism is ridiculous to me I wonder whether I'm quite ready to leave the place I grew up in. It's all making me feel quite conflicted.

Come to think of it, once Yale said yes NUS never had a chance. When I did the US apps nearly 3 years ago I'd only applied to those schools that I thought were definitely better than NUS (the economists will recognise an application of ordinal utility here), so when an offer came along it seemed natural to take it. Looking back at it I think it was kinda self-centred. I know it'll be tough for my mom.

All things considered, there was a time when I really looked forward to independence and moving out of Singapore for ever and ever. Now I'm not quite so sure.

sporadic update #5

I thought about giving my writing some impetus the last time but that hasn't turned out well. It's been about four weeks since I last wrote. On the plus side, there are now a few things to report!

For instance, my badminton skills have improved significantly (from zero) ever since the geog guys started playing badminton fortnightly.

I've changed the default font on my blog to Franklin Gothic Medium because according to a survey on a site I just found (code style) it's the most common un-fugly sans serif font on Windows systems. Myriad Web isn't even represented in the survey, so this means no one apart from myself has been reading the blog the way it's supposed to look. Fail.

I finally went down to books actually a few weeks back, with adam. It's a lovely place - I want my house to look like that when I get one. Shelves everywhere O.o and lots of gems I never thought I'd find in Singapore. I got George Perec's Life: A User's Manual and a collection of Roger McGough's poetry (including Summer with Monika). That place made my day.

There've been three birthday parties that I've been to since my release from hermithood (organising the brandenburg project) - Adam's, Jing Xun's and Brenda's. I got slightly drunk at the first, thoroughly wasted at the second, and we got peck wasted at the third by playing 猜拳 (cai1 quan2, guess fist - or "the finger-guessing game", as Google Translate tells me). All good fun.

Sidetrack: Amazingly 猜拳 has its own page in the Chinese Wikipedia (and even more amazingly, I can still read about 80% of it). Apparently it can refer to scissors paper stone (rock paper scissors) or the one where you guess the number of fists open at the time (which was the one we played for drinks). Both are documented in Ming Dynasty books, the latter in the encyclopedic 五杂组. Bet you didn't know that.

I also bought a new laptop last Thursday at the PC Show (HP ProBook 4310s) on which I'm typing this blog entry now. PC Show was mad and godawfully crowded but it's always fascinating. Anyway the laptop's running Windows 7 now after I repartitioned the hard drive (a single 450GB drive is nuts) and got rid of Vista. Battery life is about 5 hours on normal typing and web-surfing, and just over the length of a normal movie for movie playback, so I'm satisfied. I've just discovered that the Chinese input on Windows 7 is a bitch though (the old XP one used to have a correction function that would give you phrases as you went along, which was a godsend; no such luck with this one). But heck, I'm not going to use Chinese in an academic context ever again.

Well that about sums it up. I had a re: mix rehearsal yesterday and will have a TPO one later today, but that's it. Anyone up for coffee is welcome to contact me through the usual methods and suggest a place and time.